Nero MediaHome is a free application that helps you to manage your digital media collection. It's bundled as part of many premium Nero products, so this edition gives you a flavour of how the whole of its suite works.

Windows users have many options for managing and playing content, but the Nero brand promises excellent compatibility and an extremely versatile feature set. The software integrates with Nero's new mobile apps that make smartphone sharing simple, too. It's aimed at people who have a large number of camera and camcorder files that need to be sorted and organised, but can be used to manage purchased content too.

Functionality

Nero is designed to make large, chaotic media collections easier to navigate. The main bonus is tagging, including an invaluable automatic tag feature that uses file and folder names as tags in their own right. Custom tags let you organise and find files much more quickly than you ever could in a simple Explorer view.

Similarly, Nero MediaHome can identify matching faces once it has 'learned' what your friends and family look like. This allows you to search for photos based on who's in the picture. There's even a photo editor that makes it easy to enhance photos you've taken.

Nero MediaHome includes a number of useful audio organisation features, including playlist management that can interpret playlists from both Windows Media Player and iTunes. It includes a CD burner (albeit a much more basic one than Nero Burning ROM), and direct social media sharing.

Why Make the Switch?

Nero MediaHome has a number of new features in this edition. It now includes geotagging support, which lets you organise media by location; this is most useful for videos and photos you've recorded yourself. A companion Places view that literally puts your content on the map. Both point to an application that is designed to organise, and it gives you the versatility to file and tag in whatever way makes most sense to you.

Overall, though, it sells itself as a program that can 'play anything', and that will be its real strength for home users. As we amass larger and larger collections of recordings, pictures and sound, having one application to play them all is immensely useful - and even more so if it's free.